by Rees, Paul
Pictures at Eleven was released on June 28, 1982 and charted at Number 5 in the States and went three places higher in the U.K. It was also positively reviewed, Plant later claiming that he had framed the most glowing notices and hung them up around Jennings Farm.
“I’d cut off my hair and hadn’t played or listened to a Zeppelin record for two years,” he told Tom Hibbert of Q. “It would have been longer, but my daughter’s boyfriend, who was in a band, started telling me that part of ‘Black Dog’ was a mistake, because there was a bar of 5/4 in the middle of some 4/4. Well, my dander was up at that, so I pulled the record out and plonked it on. I said, ‘Listen, you little runt, that’s no mistake.’ ”
Work began on Plant’s second album in Hereford, a picturesque English city 16 miles from the border with Wales. There, Plant rented his friend Roy Harper’s rambling 15th-century house. The only new addition to the ranks was Barriemore Barlow, who had previously been a member of prog-rockers Jethro Tull and was sharing drumming duties with Phil Collins.
From Hereford the party moved on to the Mediterranean island of Ibiza in the summer of 1982. Phil Carson had a home on the island and hooked them up with the Australian owner of a luxury hotel, Pikes. The whole place was let out to them, the band setting up their gear around the hotel swimming pool.
“I put a tarpaulin up over the yard, the weather was beautiful and we had as much fun as making the first record, if not more,” says LeFevre. “We were playing music outdoors and going out to bars at night. The juices were flowing. It was a fantastic period, a rebirth in a lot of ways.”
There was, though, a marked shift in Plant’s demeanour. He took a tighter grip on the reins, leaving no one in any doubt as to who was calling the shots. It was as though he had suddenly realized he could run things as Page had done in Zeppelin. He proved to be just as demanding as his former band mate, and no born diplomat.
“He can be incredibly intense and very, very controlling,” says LeFevre. “He winds people up the wrong way. He knows what he wants but he doesn’t know how to put it across to other people terribly well sometimes. Same with that great historical knowledge of music he has—he uses that in some fairly inappropriate ways, too.
“There was one particular guitar solo that Robbie Blunt was trying to do. Robert made him play it over and over again. In the end Robbie was exhausted and totally bemused. Robert said to him, ‘Don’t you think you should use a Gibson Les Paul?’—which is what Jimmy played. Robbie played a Fender. I had to intervene and tell Robert that we’d already got more than enough down on tape.”
“I’m only dominant when I don’t like what’s going on,” Plant insisted to John Hutchinson of Record magazine, after the album’s release. “If Jimmy and I had disagreements, we would curse each other to everyone else but be very polite to one another. With these new people, it’s extremely difficult. Because my track record is a little daunting for anyone that is going to step into that situation with me.”
None of these tensions were betrayed on the finished record. The Principle of Moments was a further step removed from the tumult of Zeppelin, being more refined and sedate than its predecessor, even if its slick production has aged no better.
“Robert had this thing about trying to be modern, which we all used to take the piss out of him for,” says LeFevre. “I was forever saying to him, ‘Why don’t you sing some blues-based rock songs, man?’ ‘No, no, I don’t want to!’ ”
One song did stand out. Written at Roy Harper’s house on a Sunday afternoon, “Big Log” was built around a simple, nagging guitar figure, closer in feel to the Police than Led Zeppelin. It would give Plant his first hit single and helped propel The Principle of Moments into the Top 10 on both sides of the Atlantic in the summer of 1983, repeating the success of Pictures at Eleven. Atlantic put the album out on Plant’s new vanity label, Es Paranza, there being no suggestion now that this was anything but a vehicle for its star.
It was against this backdrop that Plant’s marriage to Maureen came to an end. He did not join the family on holiday that year, asking his former assistant, Dennis Sheehan, to take care of things in his place.
“We went to the island of Madeira,” recalls Sheehan. “I took Maureen, Carmen, a friend of Carmen’s from school, and Logan. I didn’t get into any kind of conversation with Maureen, but I realized that they were in the middle of splitting up and that this was the defining break. We didn’t do very much. I hired a car, but it’s not the most exciting place.
“I suppose I was there to be a father to the kids and to make sure Maureen was OK. I guess Robert felt that as I was a family man myself and having children, I’d be responsible enough to look after them and also be discreet.”
The divorce was finalized that August, the same month that Plant began his first solo tour. He wasn’t alone in that respect. Both Jezz Woodroffe and Robbie Blunt were also going through divorces.
“All of us were on a different planet to the one we were on when the band started,” says Woodroffe. “I had a home and a family, and in one year I was only there for two weeks out of fifty-two. How could anyone have a normal relationship in those circumstances? Did we help each other? Not really. Because we all had our own set of things going wrong.”
Going on tour was a relief, a welcome distraction. They started out in North America, selling out twenty-three arena shows, including dates at Zeppelin’s old stomping grounds, New York’s Madison Square Garden and the Forum in Los Angeles. Plant and his band, with Phil Collins on drums, traveled on an old Viscount turboprop plane. A sense of bonhomie pervaded, and the shows were tight and rapturously received, with Plant confident enough in his own songs to shun Zeppelin’s.
“It was almost like a spiritual quest,” recalls Woodroffe. “It felt like we were all walking five feet off the ground. The plane went about 60 mph—it was like being on a bumblebee. We had one near miss on it. Flames flashed out of one of the motors just as we were taking off. No one noticed but Robert. He didn’t say anything to the rest of us, he just ran for the exit door.”
This drama was short-lived and the plane took off a few minutes later. But then, the tour as a whole seemed to be blessed.
“I saw the very best of him on that tour,” says Woodroffe. “He was all that he’d been before but in a different way. He had this amazing vocal talent but also the brains to know how to apply it.”
“It felt like Robert had shrugged off the mantle of being a rock god,” says LeFevre. “It made him seem more down to earth and also he became re-engaged with his talent. I think he’d been disengaged from it in the latter years of Zeppelin. Nothing was as intense as it had been. He was happier.”
For all that, on the road, and especially in the States, Plant found he couldn’t shake off the specter of Zeppelin. It was always there, still resonating, still exerting a deep and primal power.
“Page came to see the show at Madison Square Garden and Robert asked him to get up and do the last number with us,” says Woodroffe. “He walked on and the place just blew apart. He hadn’t done a thing—just stood there with Robert. What we’d done for the preceding two hours was completely and utterly forgotten.”
“I immediately found out that I missed a partner,” Plant later told David Fricke of Rolling Stone. “Robbie [Blunt] had the toughest job of all. He is a great guitarist and he didn’t want to have to step into Page’s shoes. As much as I was proud of the fact that he had his own style, I missed the volatile showmanship that was second nature to Jimmy. Page’s performance was stunning. Suddenly, I was holding the whole thing together on my own.”
The tour climaxed in the U.K. that winter, John Paul Jones getting up with them at Bristol’s Colston Hall, Page appearing again on the second of their two-night stand at London’s Hammersmith Odeon. There was a triumphal air to these shows, putting the seal on a memorable couple of years for Plant.
Had he been a less complex man he might then have rested easy, but he was never stilled. Although outwardly he most oft
en seemed calm, almost beatific, something churned inside that drove him on.
“Robert’s birth date puts him perilously close to being a Virgo,” reflects LeFevre. “It makes for a very interesting cross between an extrovert Leo who wants to be taken at face value, and a more private man who has to keep everything organized for the sake of his own sanity.
“He is very generous but also unbelievably tight. At the end of that tour, he wanted to buy me a gift as a thank you for everything. Rex King, who was with us on the crew, told him he knew exactly what to get, and went out and bought this Rolex watch for three grand. Robert almost choked when he found out how much it was going to cost him. He still gave it to me, though, and I’ve worn it every day since.”
“He can be a really nice guy,” adds the rock photographer Ross Halfin. “I shot him on that tour for a music paper and I remember being in awe of him, but to begin with he was charming. Then we came to do the pictures. He’s a big guy and he got right in my face. He said, ‘Do you know how to take a Robert Plant picture?’ I said no. He prodded me in the chest and said, ‘Quickly.’ It really threw me, because he turned so quickly.”
Soon enough, the forces that warred within Plant would destroy the peace that this new band had brought him.
14
SEA OF LOVE
He’s the kind of person that likes to get on with life . . . and with the babysitter.
Plant and his band finished their first tour together in Japan in February of 1984. In the period between them coming off the road and starting work on his next record, Plant began a relationship with his ex-wife Maureen’s younger sister, Shirley. She and Maureen were very much alike, both of them striking looking and vivacious.
As if these waters weren’t muddied enough already, at that time Shirley was married to Plant’s farm manager, John Bryant, and the couple had been living on the Jennings Farm property. Bryant also played guitar in a local band, Little Acre. Plant had first taken an interest in them in the mid-’70s and tried then to help them get a record deal, but without success. In more recent times he had once again become a familiar face at their gigs.
“A nicer bloke than John you couldn’t wish to meet,” says John Ogden, a local journalist and sometime member of Little Acre. “They were a really nice couple, he and Shirley, and I was shocked when I heard they’d split up. She was a smashing girl and a great-looking one, too, no doubt about it.
“Robert had known John for a long time. He was Robert’s sort of gofer, the guy that looked after the farm side of things, what little bit of farm there was. Robert never really did any farm work, not like Bonham. They were all living on the same premises. Shirley was there all the time and Maureen had moved out after the divorce.
“When Shirley left him for Robert, I’m not even sure that John quit his job straight away. I don’t know that he and Robert had a huge bust-up, or that it was more of a slow, crumbling affair. The fact of the matter is, Robert likes women and he never had any trouble getting them. If he saw a woman that he wanted, it was job done.”
Led Zeppelin insiders had been gossiping about Plant and the Wilson sisters for years. Pleading anonymity, one of the band’s former roadies insisted to me that it was no surprise when Plant took up with Shirley after his divorce. “In any case, when you’ve seen Robert shagging his way through 16,000 women, there’s nothing very shocking about another, whoever it is,” he concluded.
“That situation had been in the background from when I first met Robert, three years beforehand,” says Jezz Woodroffe, then keyboardist in Plant’s band. “All of us knew it was going to happen—we were watching it develop. How did we react? It was just something else that was going on, like lots of other things. Shirley was lovely. I saw a lot of her, of course. She was around all the time for the next couple of years.”
In the long run, the relationship did not shatter Plant’s family. Maureen would eventually move back into Jennings Farm and raise the kids there. Plant bought another property just up the road from them. They remained a close-knit group. When asked about this, Plant would simply observe that Christmas get-togethers at his house were always interesting affairs.
“There you go!” says Benji LeFevre, laughing. “Fucking hell—what can I say? Despite everything, I think Robert has a great sense of family. His weakness, though, is women—and his dick. I once saw a cartoon that reminded me of him. It was a picture of a guy with an erection. There was a speech bubble coming out of his dick that said: ‘I love you.’
“Then again, it might not be his weakness. It may be that the rest of us haven’t got as much courage as he has. He’s the kind of person that likes to get on with life . . . and with the babysitter.”
It was in the middle of this convoluted atmosphere that Plant began work on his third record. Having now found his feet as a solo artist he was of a mind to do something different again, pushing himself further from his comfort zone. He had continued to take an interest in the electronic music of the time and was taken in particular with Depeche Mode, the synth-pop band from Basildon in Essex.
To work alongside LeFevre on the record he bought in a new engineer, Tim Palmer. Then twenty-two years old, Palmer had no experience with recording rock bands, having cut his teeth with such electro-pop acts of the period as Dead or Alive and Kajagoogoo.
“I hadn’t even engineered many drum kits at that point,” he says. “But Robert told me he was more interested in modern keyboard sounds and that he thought I could help him in that regard.”
The sessions started early that spring at Marcus Studios in Bayswater, West London. There were two new recruits to the original band—a nineteen-year-old backing singer named Toni Halliday and a drummer, Richie Hayward.
LeFevre had sought out Hayward and flown him in from the States as a surprise for Plant. A virtuoso, Hayward had been the engine-room of Little Feat, once hailed by Jimmy Page as his favorite group and one of the great bands to come out of California in the late ’60s. Their music was a tantalizing gumbo of rock and soul, blues and funk, gospel and boogie. Pretty much everything, in fact, but electronic pop.
“Richie was a brilliant drummer,” says Woodroffe, “but he hated technology. Robert bought him an electronic kit and every time he hit it, he’d laugh. We had loads of arguments about it.”
That summer, Plant and the band moved back to Rockfield Studios in South Wales. The rift that had opened up between them continued to widen, Plant pushing his bold agenda harder, finding allies in Woodroffe and Tim Palmer, but with the others continuing to resist it.
“Aside from me, most of the people that played on that record hated it,” Plant told me. “I just wanted to get the past behind me. I didn’t care about glory. I wanted to have another bash at singing songs and coming from a different angle. Yet despite the fact I did some decent stuff I don’t think I ever really achieved what I was looking for.”
“We started to rehearse at a little hotel just down the road from the studio,” recalls Woodroffe. “It had a gym that had all these weights and stuff in it, and I set up my keyboards in there. At that time I got hold of every new electronic gizmo that came out. I was encouraging everybody to get involved in that, and so was Robert. But Paul Martinez wasn’t interested and Robbie Blunt hated it. It turned into mine and Robert’s album, with the others playing on it.”
There was still the occasional moment of light relief. The band would troop off to the village pub each night, and there Plant proved to be more amenable to having his past exploited.
“One night, we came across these Led Zeppelin fans in the bar,” says Tim Palmer. “There was one particular girl who kept going on about wanting to listen to what we were doing. In the end she came back with us to the studio. When we politely asked her to leave she didn’t want to go. So I gave her some headphones, and she stood up on a flight case and danced as we cut the backing tracks. To top it off she took all her clothes off.”
The album was finished, though, with a sour mood hanging over the ban
d. Blunt, in particular, had taken against the new direction.
“Robbie just wasn’t into it,” says Woodroffe. “He’d rather go and sit in his car and listen to the cricket on the radio. It destroyed the band in the end. Robbie didn’t want to play on the stuff, and he and Robert were arguing all the time.”
“Robert had this bee in his bonnet about needing to feel that he was being contemporary,” adds LeFevre. “Plus, everything was emotionally confused—it was going on at the same time that he was taking up with Shirley.
“He was beginning to grow away from the idea of the band being ‘us.’ The last time he’d invested in that, it had gone disastrously wrong. I think he was deciding that he was never going to let that happen again. That it would be all about him from now on and that he was going to stay in control.”
When they were in Japan in February of that year, Atlantic Records’ boss, Ahmet Ertegun, had pitched Plant the idea of doing a record of American songs from the ’50s. The following month Plant flew out to New York to make it, breaking off from preproduction work on his own album. Although he told none of his current band, Robbie Blunt included, he intended reviving the Honeydrippers name for this project. As a further stab to Blunt, an original Honeydripper, he had also asked Page to play on the record.
“I knew that he was going to New York, but not what for,” says LeFevre. “I hadn’t previously experienced anything like that with Robert. I guess that, in the wanderings of his mind, things might then have already been changing.”
“It was done kind of as a promise to Ahmet, because he always said I knew too much about American music to leave it at that,” Plant told me. “I could sing, I could croon. It was a deal made in a bathhouse in Tokyo one night for a laugh. I wouldn’t want to hang my hat on it and say that it was an important move. It was a bit of a hoot, that’s all.”
The record was cut in a single day at Atlantic’s studios in New York. Joining Page on guitar was his fellow Yardbird, Jeff Beck, and also Nile Rodgers from Chic, the lineup being completed by a band of top session musicians.